VeChain’s traceability solution to be used in China for vaccines control

VeChain, a blockchain-based foundation that examines global supply chains to ensure the authenticity and quality of food and drug products, has had a busy week.

At the start of this week it announced it has been running a Drug and Vaccine Traceability Solution in partnership with the Shanghai municipal government. “China is currently facing a tragic vaccine scandal, where it was recently discovered that Chinese vaccine manufacturers provided hundreds of thousands of faulty and falsely documented vaccines to Chinese school children,” said a VeChain Foundation Medium blog post.

VeChain’s traceability solution has been running since 2016 and is currently the only blockchain project supported by the Shanghai government. “VeChain is the only approved blockchain traceability provider in Shanghai and has been tasked to achieve the China traceability requirements by 2020. VeChain’s traceability solution is being developed and tested in Shanghai, and will soon be rolled out across China,” the blog post continued.

This is now especially important after the news in July that health-care company Changsheng Bio-technology Co. was hit by fines from China’s pharmaceutical regulator for having produced 250,000 low-quality vaccines for infants. The company was also found to have fabricated data for a rabies vaccine as far back as 2014.

In addition, the regulator announced that vaccine maker, state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products Co, had produced more than 400,000 low-quality infant vaccines.

VeChain’s platforms combines IoT technology – that uses RFID and “near field communication” (or NFC) tags to track supply chain movements – with its own proprietary VeChainThor Blockchain that captures and records production and transportation data. The system can even monitor temperature levels for vaccines, from manufacture through storage, cold chain distribution and hospital usage. Each vaccine is labelled with a unique identifying code that covers the complete history of the product.